The Aspern Papers: Conjuring Ghosts By Andrew N. Adler
Copyright © 1996 by Andrew N. Adler. All rights reserved.
Adler 1
Some moments in The in The Aspern Papers, Papers, when taken out of context, seem at once to betray a radical undecidability. For example, at one point in his ruminations over the Misses Bordereau, the narrator exclaims, “There was no end to the questions it was possible to ask about them and no end to the answers it was not possible to frame” (183).1 In context, however, the hyperbole becomes more evident as such, for the quoted sentence is immediately preceded prec eded by the wry comment, comment, “[The Bordereau women] must once have been young or at least middle-aged.” middle-aged.” True, James steeps his short story in mystery; mystery; some critics even concede that the soughtafter “Aspern papers” may not even exist. Still, even recent criticism tries to restrain the undecidability of the text. Waldmeir declares that, “The narrator is reliable in his perceptions and in his reporting them; he is unreliable in his understanding or interpretation of them” (262), while Falconer writes: We may suspect the narrator but we trust the text.… While we never learn the “whole “whole truth” — about the papers or the relationship relationship between the sisters — the aesthetic premise, the teleological principle that keeps reader interest alive is that such matters are knowable; reading consists of progress, admittedly haphazard and liable to interruption, along a road leading to understanding. (8, 9) Another scholar details how the narrator “shapes events according to his own mania,” yet this scholar discusses a consistent progression of events “confirmed” by the reader even while “the narrator is incapable of interpreting correctly the very story he elaborates” (Gargano 1, 5). Several other commentators, in refuting Booth’s position that the use of an unreliable narrator frustrates James’ alleged purpose of “evoking the poetry of the visitable past,” also uniformly assume that Jeffrey Aspern led a Romantic life and wrote Romantic poetry. These commentators then discuss whether the narrator is capable of understanding or re-enacting or
1
Parenthetical numbers unaccompanied by other publication information refer to page numbers in the Signet Classic edition of The The Turn of the Screw & Other Short Novels. Novels .
Adler 2
moving beyond the Romantic past.2 One relatively sophisticated analysis implicates both James and the “modern” reader in the narrator’s failure to “receive the gifts of this past”: [The narrator] represents a state of mind quite opposite to that of a poet whose life was itself a Romantic poem. …James’ own failure failure to recover recover the Romantic Romantic past is thus dramatized in the narrator’s own story.…And the modern reader is denied the love story of Aspern in part because he, too, cannot write romantic poetry or love as romantically as Aspern did. We are locked, James seems to say, into our own time. (Bell 124-25) In contrast, I want to argue that The that The Aspern Papers stands Papers stands as a relatively “post-modern” text, in that its own “internal “internal evidence” (160) admits a reading reading that questions questions the existence existence of any definitively reliable text, memory, or perception. Certainly, one can deploy the standard postmodern epistemological attack on the above critics even without having read James’ story: namely, we remain so “locked into our own time” that we can never know what it means — if anything anything — to “love as romantically romantically as Aspern Aspern did.” Hence, we cannot profitably profitably hypothesize hypothesize an independent independent locus of study called the “Romantic era” except as a functional (and endlessly endlessly deferred) origin of longing. Yet smugly deconstructing “reporting” vs. “reporting” vs. “interpreting” “interpreting” does not address Falconer’s point about the story’s “aesthetic premise.” Falconer Fal coner apparently means that the most pleasurable way of reading this particular particular story (and the way that does least violence to the structura structurall unity of the story’s codes) will accept the “convention” of narrative trustworthiness (“[the narrator] had been there, it was his story,” Falconer 8). But, is it necessarily painful to read the text as constantly frustrating our attempts to make sense of it? The reader may actually experience joyful liberation upon realizing that all meaning is contextual and relational, that th at “conventional” “con ventional” and “natural” narrative alike can emerge clearly, in a close reading, as mutually-supporting categories.
2
See also Davidson, Schneider, and Booth (354-64).
Adler 3
On the other hand, zealous interpretations often hamper readers’ pleasure. If, say, we construe the apparitions in The in The Turn of the Screw as Screw as “genuine ghosts” or “vision and madness,” we overlook more subtle psychological forces haunting the characters and James himself, and we consequently miss vistas of metaphorical significance (see Meisel 1995: viii-ix). Analogously, Aspern’s “bright ghost” repeatedly visits the narrator in Aspern in Aspern Papers. Papers. That the narrator might be hallucinating presumably remains an “unacceptable, even unavailable alternative” for Meisel (1995: ix).3 In this present essay, though, I provisionally assume the availability of hallucination (and other counter-conventional untrustworthiness) and attempt to justify my assumptions via aesthetic acceptability. The forms of untrustworthiness exhibited include, in order of discussion, (1) documents; (2) paintings; (3) voices; (4) memories; and (5) ghosts. The first hint that conventions respecting a trustworthy text are flouted derives from The from The Aspern Papers Pa pers’’ allusions to falsified written texts. The narrator prints a bogus visiting card (160), later writes falsehoods to Tita (251), and Cumnor disguises his own handwriting (161). Further, Further, Juliana may effectively have forced her niece to write a deceitful deceitful letter to Cumnor (“She made me write.… write.… I wrote what she bade me.”, 209), which demonstrates demonstrates that writings do not necessary necessary embody any of their author’s ego. Even “prior “prior to interpretat interpretation,” ion,” if you will, texts can lie. Second, the story questions the “historic truth” (236) of physical attributes such as appearance appearance and voice. When the narrator narrator claims that “everyone knows” that Aspern was “one of the most genial men” (155), the narrator unwittingly proceeds to divulge ample evidence to the contrary (Davidson 40-41). We encounter more difficulty in disproving the assertions that Aspern was very handsome (155). Yet, for instance, contemporary accounts of Aspern’s favorable favorable appearance might have been tainted by his admirers’ admirers’ love for him on other grounds. The narrator himself “judges” the only extant portrait of Aspern as a youth “to have a valuable quality of resemblance” (217), but here we discern the narrator’s bias towards his “god.” 3
I wrote this essay for a class taught by Prof. Meisel, and I ’m particularly indebted to him for his concept 182-92), a crucial crucial feature of my argument. argument. of “deferred action” (Meisel 1987: 22-36, 182-92),
Adler 4
Furthermore, the narrator, as discussed below, imagines the portrait changing expression and speaking, which casts doubt on the narrator’s ability to objectively perceive resemblance. Also, Juliana’s Juliana’s father may have painted painted the portrait, portrait, and if Juliana had also thought Aspern a “god” (195), the artist may have exaggerated Aspern’s good looks for his daughter’s sake. The narrator twice acknowledges the unreliability of transcriptions of visual data. First, he notes that Juliana may veil her eyes so that nobody will notice that “the great poet had overdone it” (223). (Here, he characteristically attributes meaning to absence. He earlier had thought that closed shutters “became as expressive as eyes consciously closed” (182).) When Tita actually gazes into the old woman’s eyes, without the veil of textual mediation, she (unreliably) hallucinates (243). Second, the narrator longs for the “romantic” days before photography “annihilated surprise” (185; cf. 157). By implication, the narrator believes that, prior to photography, surprise accompanied previously unseen u nseen faces. The above textual evidence concerning the non-privileged position of visual/pictorial images consistently if faintly evokes a sophisticated late-twentieth century philosophic stance. Today, one can articulate that poems or paintings from a bygone era became “great” and “romantic” precisely because precisely because they they elicited surprise (“overdoing it”) — i.e., because they represented represented their subject in a way that prompted us to belatedly and enjoyably imagine that the subject had always conveyed those represented attributes. Indeed, Robert Schwartz has propounded the strong claim cl aim that “pictures not only shape our perception of the world; they can and do play an important role in making it” (711).4 Incidentally, The Incidentally, The Aspern Papers’ Papers’ narrator is mistaken in trusting that photography has changed this dynamic. Photographs alter our perceptions (Sontag) (Sonta g) and even help to create our world (Goodman 15-16).
4
Schwartz takes seriously Picasso’s claim concerning a portrait of Gertrude Stein which the artist had just completed. When told by critics that the picture didn’t look like Stein, Picasso is supposed to have quipped, “Everybody thinks she is not at all like her portrait, but never mind, in the end she will manage to look just like it” (Schwartz 711).
Adler 5
My next example of undecidability involves the perception/creation of others’ voices.5 First, consider how the narrator complicates the source of his alleged knowledge of Aspern’s voice: He was not a woman’s poet… in the modern phase of his reputation; but the situation situation had been different different when the man’s own voice was mingled mingled with his song. That voice, by every testimony, testimony, was one of the sweetest sweetest ever heard. “Orpheus and the Maenads!” was the exclamation that rose to my lips when I first turned over his correspondence. (156) It turns out, in the next paragraph, that “the modern phase” rests upon “mere echoes of echoes” — inevitably, for “the dead can’t speak sp eak for themselves” (213). Yet instead of rehearsing the supposedly bountiful testimony concerning Aspern’s “original” voice, an ancient allusion (Orpheus) passively substitutes. Crucially, the narrator often repeats this type of evasion. That is, while he believes that he can distinguish distinguish nuances in individual individual voices, those voices in fact graft graft onto one another in unpredictable ways: Thus, the narrator boasts that he can “distinguish perfectly between the speeches [Tita] made on her own responsibility and those the old lady imposed upon her” (175). Further, he perceives that he h e can “surely” judge jud ge Tita’s veracity by “her extreme limpidity” (207) or her he r “information, [given] flatly, without expression… that seemed such a direct testimony” (195).6 In contrast, he “well remembers” the “old-fashioned, artificial sound” that Juliana imparts to her mendacious mendacious speech (201). But, when the narrator describes describes his theory for how Tita acquired acquired her manner of speech, the foundation for his conclusions crumbles: …I observed for the first time that Miss Tita had acquired by contact something of the trick of the familiar, soft-sounding, almost infantile speech of [Venice]. I judged that she had imbibed this invertebrate dialect from the natural way wa y the
5
I use the term “voice” “voice” broadly to include include written style. Because the narrator thinks that he can separate Tita’s voice from her aunt’s and that he can tell if she is lying, he reports twice that Tita can only fib on paper (209, 230).
6
Adler 6
names of things and people — mostly purely local — rose to her lips. If she knew little little of what they represented represented she knew still less of anything anything else.… else.… If she had not been so decent her references would have seemed to carry one back to the queer rococo Venice of Casanova. Casanova. I found myself falling falling into the error of thinking thinking of her too as one of Jeffrey Jeffrey Aspern’s contemporarie contemporaries; s; this came from her having so little in common with my own. (193) By this account, extreme limpidity, spontaneity, or “naturalness” of inflection carries not truth but its opposite, non-referentiality. 7 Natural, osmotic o smotic and therefore meaningless mean ingless phrases include include those that “rise to the lips” — like the narrator’s narrator’s own “Orpheus own “Orpheus and the Maenads!” Furthermore, it remains impossible for the narrator to distinguish whether or not Tita’s “natural,” “direct testimony” (that she is privy to a former generation’s secrets) constitutes a “trick.” Conversely, Juliana’s “artificial” speech reveals neither knowledge nor deceit. (Getting Juliana to “pronounce Aspern’s name first” will prove nothing (217).) These conclusions apply generally, generally, to anyone trying to interpret interpret anyone else’s words. words. For, communication communication works within within a web of graftings and translations, and no original or solitary voice emerges as an index to truth. Now, within the conventional framework, these communicative gaps arguably expose ambiguity but nothing more revolutionary. After all, if the two Bordereau women are in cahoots to mislead the narrator, they can deliberately deliberately change their tone of voice to conceal their conspiracy (grafting). And, if the narrator fails to find Aspern’s true voice, in order to imitate or exalt it, the failure may derive from the narrator’s incompetence as lover and critic. The story’s central irony remains — namely, that its editor-narrator cannot discern whose voice is whose. Yet, conceivably, conceivably, the text does not so limit its logic. Arguably, the text denies direct direct testimony testimony not only to Aspern and to its “modern” “modern” readers, readers, but also to everyone, everyone, generally. generally. It invites us, Zen-like, to inquire further: Why is Aspern “romantic” if nobody hears his pure
7
I’m adopting definitions from Hilary Putnam’s semantic argument against Cartesian skepticism (see Putnam 2264).
Adler 7
voice? Why is Aspern handsome if nobody sees his face? Who printed up this short story, and is he trying to mislead mislead us? Fortunately Fortunately,, we can spiral down the ravine of undecidability undecidability only so far before before the principle of deferred action a ction (of memory memor y and imagination) organizes o rganizes an aesthetically-pleasing respite from vertigo (cf. Meisel 1987: 22-36, 182-92). In my reading of Aspern Aspern Papers, Papers, even a “reliable” narrator or “ideal” reader could never reclaim the alleged original Aspernesque romance. romance. Nevertheless, Nevertheless, what we can do, and what the story’s story’s narrator attempts attempts to do without much self-awareness, is to imaginatively and self-consciously create a textual romance of our own. The story itself itself provides a recipe for creating a romance. First, the narrator “hatche[s] a little romance” about Juliana and her artist-father (184), which allows him to organize such information as the “quality” of the portrait and of Juliana’s European accent. Then, his “imagination frequently went back to the period” when Aspern first traveled traveled abroad, and he molds an Aspern to suit his own sensibilit sensibilities: ies: “…I went with him [Aspern] — I tried to judge how the Old World would have struck him” (186). Although the narrator sometimes speaks of “historic” or “literal” truth, he also constantly uses the conditional language language of imagination, imagination, invoking invoking the phrase “as if” more than a dozen times (e.g., discovering discovering Juliana still alive “was as if I had been told Queen Caroline was” (155).) At one point, “it was as if… Miss Bordereau’s secrets were palpably in the air…” (182), in a Paterian instantiation and contextualiza contextualization tion of words. words. And, although although ridiculed for it by ancient Juliana, he hits the mark when he reduces his career goal from “lay[ing] “lay[ing] bare the truth” truth” to “measuring” “measuring” the great texts with the yardstick of his own interpretations (214). Memory is also a tool of the imagination. So, imaginatively commanding the forwardlooking counterpart to deferred action, the narrator asks, “[W]hat store of memories had [Juliana] laid away for the monotonous future?” (184). The text thus dramatizes the mind’s creative action in advance of (and anticipating) any given moment’s stimuli.8 In an ingenious symmetry, 8
The text demonstrates the existence of the mechanism described here even though the narrator is probably unaware of it. In fact, the often-repressed narrator at one point represses repression: “It was not to be supposed that the
Adler 8
however, the text also dramatizes the difficulty in “prov[ing] memories false.” The narrator endeavors to do just that with Tita’s glory days in Venice. He scoffs that, “It was Miss Tita who judged it brilliant,” b rilliant,” and “Poor Miss Tita evidently was of o f the impression that she had had a brilliant youth” (192, 193). Remarkably, however, these lines come just before befo re his structural analysis of her speech, which, as I discussed above, obliterates his claim to know that she is exaggerating. The unknowability continues several pages later, when (at a café) the narrator again divines that Tita is pining over her misspent adulthood: I saw that she enjoyed it even more than she told; she was agitated with the multitude of her impressions. She had forgotten what an attractive thing the world is, and it was coming over her that somehow she had for the best years of her life been cheated of it.… She became silent, as if she were thinking thinkin g with a secret sadness of opportunities, forever lost, which ought to have been easy…. (206) Here, on the one hand, the narrator creates romance by reading silence “as if” it were plenitude, even though his “conventional” opportunity for romance with Tita or through Aspern is already “forever lost,” lost,” and even though (as the text has demonstrated demonstrated with its deconstruction deconstruction of natural voice) he cannot possibly know what Tita is thinking. On the other hand, if the narrator has by chance described described Tita’s “secret” thoughts, thoughts, then she herself has constructed constructed a romance — for she broods over what she never experienced experienced and thus cannot conjure except through the mechanism and effect of deferred action. In either case, then, it is not so much the narrator’s, narrator’s, Tita’s, or the reader’s reader’s failure that forces this indirect route to romance. Rather, a familiar metacritical paradigm (a function of the text itself) predestines this route. Recent criticism notwithstanding, the narrator and reader can can find romance, even though the direct route there (supposedly represented by Jeffrey Aspern) was never available in the first place.
emotion produced by her aunt’s death had blotted out the recollection that I was interested in that lady’s relics…” (238).
Adler 9
Finally, Finally, the story contains contains a parable parable to explain why ghosts appear. Granted, Granted, the text contains contains a wealth of evidence that the characters characters do not hallucinate. hallucinate. For example, example, the narrator narrator speaks of an “optical trick” (at Tita’s “transfiguration, 250) as opposed to “real” darkness (251), and Tita merely speaks “in the character” of a young woman. The Colleoni statute only looks “as if” it will cast its “personal” voice towards the overwrought narrator (248), and so forth. These qualifications presumably suffice to allay our fears about the narrator’s sanity when he hears the portrait speak without any “as ifs,” or about Tita’s when she simply “sees” Juliana’s eyes stare at her in the dark. Yet we can still read these ghostly visitations “literally,” which adds to the richness of the reading reading experience by not prematurely prematurely cutting off the text’s formal formal logic. For, as I have tried to show, the text allows for the possibility of very unreliable perceptions and memories, and it allows for the possibility that such dubious data are inevitably one source of our world-making. With this in mind, consider the sequence of events leading to the first supernatural summons summons (180): First, the narrator gets no rent receipt from the old lady. He then takes this omission as deliberate, as “a visible irony.” Third, he reports that he “afterward perceived… the real reading,” i.e., the true reason why Juliana purposely refused to give him “even a morsel of paper.” Lastly, he invokes Aspern’s ghost, and it appears. This passage enacts the ways to deal with the definite absence of objective documentary evidence. Initially, one can assert the structure of irony, declaring that “everything was something else”; here, absence is “visible.” If that bold declaration doesn’t satisfy, one can project backwards a later absence and belatedly call it a “perception” and a “real reading.” But, if one has already figured out the significant incompleteness of memory and perception, it might occur even to a sane person that the next “logical” “logical” step to knowledge knowledge entails maneuvering maneuvering as close as possible to vision and madness madness — the extremes of imagination. The post-modern reading paradoxically recommends conjuring ghosts as the only rational response.
Adler 10
Works Cited Bell, Millicent. “The “The Aspern Papers: Papers: The Unvisitable Past.” Henry Past.” Henry James Review. Review. 10:2 (1989): (1989): 120-27. Booth, Wayne. The Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Fiction. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1961. Davidson, Arnold E. “Transformations of Text in Henry James’s The James’s The Aspern Papers.” Papers.” English English Studies Studies in Canada. Canada. 14:1 (1988): 39-48. Falconer, Graham. “Flaubert, James and the Problem of Undecidability.” Comparative Undecidability.” Comparative Lit. 39 Lit. 39 (1987): 1-18. Gargano, James W. “The “The Aspern Papers: Papers: The Untold Story.” Story.” Studies in Short Fiction. Fiction. 10 (1973): 1-10. Goodman, Nelson. Languages Nelson. Languages of Art . Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976. Meisel, Perry. The Perry. The Myth of the Modern. Modern. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987. Meisel, Perry. Introduction. The Introduction. The Turn of the Screw & Other Short Novels. Novels. By Henry James. New York: Signet, 1995. vii-xiii. Putnam, Hilary. Reason, Hilary. Reason, Truth & History. History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981. Schneider, Daniel J. “The Unreliable Narrator: James’s The James’s The Aspern Papers and Papers and the Reading of Fiction.” Studies Fiction.” Studies in Short Fiction. Fiction. 13 (1976): 43-49. Schwartz, Robert. “The Power of Pictures.” Journal Pictures.” Journal of Philosophy. Philosophy. (1985): 711-20. Sontag, Susan. On Susan. On Photography. Photography. New York: Dell, 1977. Waldmeir, Joseph J. “Miss Tina Did It: A Fresh Look at The at The Aspern Aspern Papers.” Papers.” Centennial Centennial Rev. 26:3 (1982): 256-67.
